Mexican independence, mold, and… oh, yeah, the train station

* Today was a fairly easy shift. We’re running off the fumes of the flood, and the economy stories (while boring and dense) are strong.

Also Daryl Hawks (hereafter referred to as Saint Daryl) left us a sports package 3:20 long. Did we really need to spend 45 seconds on the New York groundskeepers doing the YMCA dance? No. But it’s less work for me. God bless St. Daryl. (Among his miracles are chewing up airtime and the power of flight.)

* Linking that video of St. Daryl in flight makes me wonder why we don’t have embeddable video. It’s 2008. No one wants to follow a link to watch a video.

* Andy will be doing his weather forecast from the Davis Street train station in Evanston on Friday. I asked Rob and Zoraida to ad lib about this briefly while tossing to weather in my second segment. Here’s how my second segment began…

Zoraida: “What’s that?”Rob: “The moon.”Zoraida: “No. To the right of the moon.”Rob: “That’s the Wrigley building. It’s lit up – red, white and green.”Zoraida: “Yes, for Mexican Independence Day.”

(12 minutes later)

Zoraida: “Is there a bunch of mold in the air or what?”Andy: “Yeah, it’s mold season.”Rob: “Mold, huh?”Andy: “Yep.”

(5 minutes later)

Andy: “Well, today’s going to be a beautiful day with highs in the seven…”Zoraida: (panicky) “You’regonnabeatthetrainstationFriday!”

* Japanese researcher teaches beluga whale to speak. Great. Meanwhile, that baby beluga at the Shedd we made such a big deal about is just floating there with a dumb look on his face. Then again, if you could talk to a beluga, what would you even talk about? Eating and swimming? It’s like every conversation with Michael Phelps.